Widespread antibiotic resistance is currently posing a grave health burden through a multitude of serious infections.2 The rise in bacterial adaptation can be directly correlated to the paucity of novel classes of antimicrobial agents.3 In the past few decades, synthetic tailoring has been the primary strategy for enhancing established core scaffolds through analog generation. Although this approach has been fruitful, no major classes of new antibiotics were introduced between 1962 and 2000.4 Therefore, to restore robust access to effective therapeutic agents, it is imperative that we engage in aggressive efforts to discover novel chemical entities with unique microbial targets.3,5 
Acinetobacter baumannii has emerged as a major nosocomial opportunistic pathogen that can spread epidemically among patients causing ventilator associated pneumonia and bacteremia, with mortality rates as high as 60%.6 Numerous reports have also shown startling emergence of multidrug resistant A. baumannii in hospitals, and also identification of pandrug resistance strains at some locations.1,6 A. baumanni strains possess both intrinsic resistance to antibiotics and a facile ability to acquire genes encoding resistance determinants. In addition, antibiotic resistance of this pathogenic microbe appears to be mediated by their facile ability to form biofilms with a highly structured extracellular polymeric matrix, and includes the ability to colonize medical devices.7 When attached, bacterial cells that comprise the biofilm possess 10-1000 fold lower susceptibility towards antimicrobial agents compared to planktonic forms.8 Although biofilm control by drug targeting has become a high priority objective,7,8 marine microbes as a source of novel chemical entities remain underexplored.